Chelsea, Hillary, and Top Researchers Make Global Push For Girls In Science

While science is moving forward so fast that 75 percent of all jobs will require science training by 2018, women have been falling behind. One in three computer science grads were women in 1987, versus one in four in 2001, and one in five today. Women now comprise only 24 percent of STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) fields.

But a booming number of new United States and global initiatives aimed at luring girls into science should change that, said top academics and New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) leaders last week. Out of 2,000 teenagers applying in the last two weeks alone for the NYAS’s “Junior Academy”–providing mentorship to kids in 104 countries—a whopping 80 percent were girls.

“Girls around the world are standing up,” NYAS Senior VP of Global Business Development Celina Morgan Standard told a recent NYAS press conference.

It’s not just girls. The women who want to help them are standing up, too. For an intense global program called 1000 Girls-1000 Futures, the NYAS recently sought 60 women willing to devote a full year to mentees from Mexico alone. NYAS President and CEO Ellis Rubinstein told the presser Mexican supporters were “terrified” no one would step up.

But 170 woman researchers—and counting— stepped up worldwide.

“All the way around, we have received far more applications from woman scientists than we asked for,” NYAS Education Executive Director Meghan Groome, Ph.D., told Bioscience Technology. “Women and girls around the world are excited.”

Summoned by the UN

It all started over a year ago, when UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon summoned Rubinstein. Rubinstein thought he would be part of a big group—but he was the sole invitee. When asked why, Ban Ki-moon said (Rubinstein reported): “Mr. Rubinstein, every great challenge the UN is facing—climate change, infectious disease, poverty reduction, education— all require science and technology as solutions. I want to hear what is going on, what scientists and technologies can do to address these challenges.”

Read More: Unusual Suite of “Women in Science” Initiatives Hailed: Special Report

Specifically, he wanted to know if Rubinstein could export to the world versions of the NYAS Brooklyn and Bronx programs that have successfully lured the young into science.

“How to scale up to make a difference worldwide?” Rubinstein asked. He did not have an answer at first. Then Cisco invited him to a meeting of “The Internet of Things,” networks of appliances hooked up online. “I suddenly realized the internet could help transform our programs to have impact all over the world.”

One million kids in science-career pipeline

In the fall of 2014, the NYAS launched the Global STEM Alliance at the United Nations with founding partners PepsiCo Foundation, ARM, and Cisco, among other partners. “The idea was so powerful that already today we have over 125 partners in 50 countries: governments, corporations, educational institutes and NGOS,” Rubinstein said. “Our mission, not small, is to bring one million children into the stem pipeline by 2020. To get them out of high school, and not lose them. Make sure they are all happily pursuing science, technology, engineering or math,” and not just in pure science jobs, but also jobs like design-making and movies. “Every industry needs this kind of competence.”

The Junior Academy, one arm of that effort, has already picked 250 students, from 48 countries. These kids will get, via internet connection, constant personal mentoring advice “from the greatest scientist and engineering minds in the world,” Rubinstein said. They will also be able to reach out to each other, some from the most isolated spots on earth.

The other major arm was created due to former US Secretary of State—and current US presidential candidate—Hillary Clinton. When told about the Junior Academy, she said, “`That’s fantastic, but please make a similar network just for girls, because some girls are intimidated by the sometimes male culture of science and engineering.’ So we pledged to create 1000 futures for 1000 girls,” Rubinstein said.

1000 Girls-1000 Futures, conceived as a Global Clinton Initiative commitment, is now launched, said NYAS Board Chair and State University of New York Chancellor Nancy Zimpher.

Zimpher told the NYAS gala following the presser. “It is, at this point, a beta website featuring 300 professional scientists and engineers who have committed to spend the entire year mentoring 300 high school girls from ten countries, from Shanghai to Saudi Arabia, Cape Town to Pueblo, Mexico. I can only imagine what these young women are being exposed to, given the talent of these professional scientists.”

Chelsea: critical step in eradicating poverty

At the gala, Clinton Foundation Vice Chair Chelsea Clinton, Ph.D., M.Phil., M.P.H., told the assembled a necessary step in eradicating global poverty is to get “more women engaged in STEM fields. We cannot effectively continue to disinvite and disenfranchise half of our global potential. And we know this intervention comes at an important time because we’ve been losing ground.”

When she thinks about women in science, “I literally think about the deterioration of participation in the arc of my own life,” she said. “In 1987 Santa Claus gave me a computer for Christmas: thank you Santa Claus.” But also in 1987, she said, “women made up more than one in three computer science grads in the US. When I graduated from Stanford in 2001, women were more than one in four of science grads, and we are now less than one in five.”

We know this is happening for “a myriad of reasons,” she said. In grades one through three, “girls are just as interested in math and science as boys—and actually perform better on tests. I’m sorry to the men in the audience.”

Girls stop wanting to be astronauts

However, she said, “this starts to change in middle school, when math and science teachers, male and female, start calling on girls less. Girls stop wanting to be astronauts and engineers. They stop wanting to build bridges and space ships. They also stop wanting to be CEOs—and the president—in middle school.”

We also know intervention is needed in middle school “because of what we see happening in high school. In 2013, there were three American states in which not a single young woman took the computer science AP (advanced placement) exam,” Clinton said.

“So we know we have to do more to ensure that girls don’t end up with that imagination gap that is so crushing,” she concluded. “They need to envision themselves as (NYAS board chair) Nancy. They need to envision themselves as leaders in science and technology, as innovators in solving problems that matter in their lives and the future life of our planet. We know we will start closing that imagination gap if we start matching girls interested in science, with women already succeeding in science.”

Other science initiatives for girls

Other recent science initiatives exclusively for girls include the US State Department and NYAS’s global NeXXt Scholar Program, the AOL Charitable Foundation, Step Up, the Maine Coastal Studies for Girls science camp, Girls Who Code, the Women in Science (WiSci) Girls STEAM Camp, and First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let Girls Learn.